In ‘No Judgment,’ Lauren Oyler sets out to prove she’s better than you - The Washington Post

Against the odds, Lauren Oyler is a phenomenon. Although she is a member of that endangered and increasingly irrelevant species, literary critic, she is famed and feared for her scathing reviews of books that everyone else is too afraid to admit to hating. The attacks in question have appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, among other publications, and they are faithfully circulated and remarked upon on X (formerly Twitter). Love her or hate her, you have to read her, at least if you hail from a milieu no less real for being rarefied, interbred and roiled by internecine disputes. In the literary world, a new Oyler essay is an event. “No Judgment,” Oyler’s debut collection, contains six essays, therefore six events, and it begins by loudly proclaiming its own title to be a joke. “There is never no judgment,” Oyler writes in the introduction, “and certainly not in this book.” By “judgment,” she appears to mean something that contrasts with opinion: A judgment, Oyler s

Against the odds, Lauren Oyler is a phenomenon. Although she is a member of that endangered and increasingly irrelevant species, literary critic, she is famed and feared for her scathing reviews of books that everyone else is too afraid to admit to hating. The attacks in question have appeared in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, among other publications, and they are faithfully circulated and remarked upon on X (formerly Twitter). Love her or hate her, you have to read her, at least if you hail from a milieu no less real for being rarefied, interbred and roiled by internecine dis